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McCorkle and his partner, Jane Whitley, were then tasked with finding the fish’s owner.

“Is anyone in the neighborhood missing a fish?” Whitley, Mecklenburg Democratic chair, asked on social media.

They posted a notice for the lost fish on the NextDoor app, and were led to their neighbor Deborah Triplett, a Charlotte artist.

Triplett, coincidentally, was missing a fish from the pond in her yard.

“I looked at their address and I thought, my goodness, maybe it’s one of my fish,” Triplett told TV station Fox 46.

McCorkle was able to release the fish back into the pond, but it’s a mystery how the koi made it to his backyard. He and Whitley have a theory, however.

The nearest creek is a quarter mile away from their home, he wrote. They think the fish fell out of the sky and into their backyard, possibly by a large bird of prey that caught the fish and lost its grip midflight.